Which Broswer to use?

[Mark Hennessy]

Hello Mark, I think you are taking a much bigger risk running an obsolete OS which Microsoft is about to stop supporting. It's now 3 OS's behind the current one and was inherently a much less secure environment.

Oh I don't know - I still use Window 98 on another machine

Never had a virus or other problem in all my years of computing. Famous last words

I'm pretty sure that Microsoft will continue to make the existing updates available - it's just that they'll release fewer new ones after support has officially ended, and I'm pretty convinced that most of them are unnecessary for those of us that use our machines sensibly. I've got the 3 service packs saved locally, and I'll be using XP for a good few years yet. I'm not alone...

For non-technical users, sticking with a recent OS is probably good advice. Although the last computer I fixed for a non-technical friend was running Vista and half-decent protection software, but it was still completely messed up. Never underestimate the ability of users to get themselves into trouble

I trust my security to Win 7 updated fully, a good AV, anti-malware and a proper firewall.

I have Windows 7 on a laptop, and it's fine - just as good as XP. But I doubt it would run well on this hardware, and I have no intention of paying Micro$oft the money to find out. This old Compaq machine came with a totally legit XP license.

My main gripe with Firefox is that they plunged headlong into making a Chrome clone and I am comfotable with a traditional browser, simple as that. Adblock Plus works happily with 3.62, if that changed I would probably move over to Seamonkey.

Not sure what you mean by that - from memory it looks almost exactly like 3.6 - perhaps with a couple of changes to the position of buttons like Refresh. On this machine, at least.

I've never tried Seamonkey - I'll check it out at some stage. Thanks

For ultimate security on a low spec' machine you would of course be wiser to use Ubuntu, Mint or one of the other popular Linux distributions.

Ah - you've opened up a wound there!

I have Ubuntu 10.10 running on a very similar Compaq machine. This one has 2GB of RAM, a 3.06GHz CPU, the same chipset as my Evo, and an upgraded Nvidia graphics card because support for the Intel 845 chipset was silently dropped (it was fine on 10.04, and no clue was given when I ran 10.10 from a live CD).

I like a lot about Linux and Ubuntu, but frankly, this machine is a total dog! I've moaned about it often enough (even earlier in this thread), so won't repeat myself, other than to say that XP runs really very well on decent P4 systems, and that's what I need for my main workshop machine.

Mark